Keep in mind that a disclaimer was also made that this decision could change in the future.

To me, this is simply a temporary fix to Pet Battles so that players don't immediately break the gameplay on the day that Pet Battles goes live. My hope is that a better solution will be found and eventually implemented.

Even though it's not a final and absolute decision (yet), I think more constructive feedback for developers will still help the creative process. Let's keep the channels of discussion open as well as an open mind.

I don't like to raid or pvp. I barely run dungeons. I like questing, but my main interest in WoW is collecting pets. I was really excited not only about the pet battles themselves but about finding a way to make profit off something I love doing. Running a pet business was basically going to be my endgame.

If they don't change this, Mists suddenly got a whole lot less interesting for me.

When someone told me that wild pets could all be sold on the AH that seemed like almost too many, but none is way too few! I think the best way to deal with it would be some kind of criteria, and the criteria could be somewhat arbitrary. It would give people who battle bragging rights, while not completely leaving out collecting wild pets for those who don't. Since I'm not actually on beta I'm not in the best position to come up with what that criteria would be, maybe something like Cata and MoP zone pets won't be tradable (for this expansion, perhaps to change later) but any pet in an area from the original world, or Outland, or Northrend will be.. Or maybe a cap on the level of the pet, instead, like pets can be sold up to level 15 (the cap is 25 right?) Or maybe use something like the beast master talent in hunters, and then say any pet that can be captured without the petmaster talent can be sold.. Or maybe some combination of different criteria, level, area, pet type...

Here's what I think - When you put a pet in a cage, it resets the pet's level to 1. Rarity, on the other hand, isn't touched. I know that some people would accidentally put a pet in a cage and have their beloved level 24 pet reduced back to a level 1, but they could probably fix this just by putting in a confirmation button when you want to cage a pet.

Imthedci wrote:Here's what I think - When you put a pet in a cage, it resets the pet's level to 1. Rarity, on the other hand, isn't touched. I know that some people would accidentally put a pet in a cage and have their beloved level 24 pet reduced back to a level 1, but they could probably fix this just by putting in a confirmation button when you want to cage a pet.

What do you all think of this?

I think this is an awesome idea for a fix. Then people would have to lvl their pets if they want use them instead of being able to jump in with a lvl 25 right off the bat.

I wholeheartedly agree with the suggestion to return the pets to level one when they are caged. Blizzard wants us to get out in the world and see and do things with the pet battles. But once a few people have high level pets on the AH, it will be very easy to skip the low level stuff and not earn your way to the top. I am even seeing this in my beta guild. There is one person spamming guild chat looking for someone to give him "higher level pets". Returning the pets to level one would not only stop that quick progression that borders on cheating, but would allow people who love pets but do not want to battle them to still collect them. If Blizzard wants to restrict the achievements to those that have progressed in the system, then make the achievements require certain pet levels or implement trainer levels. This would function like the guild achievements that require a certain reputation level within the guild. They could also make it so that only the common ones could be traded. If you are just collecting and not battling, then the rarity makes no difference. People doing pet battles are not going to want to keep commons when they could chase down a rare with better stats. There are so many ways to fix this and still allow the trading. I hope that Blizzard will change this and find a solution that is more accommodating.

I'm disappointed, honestly, and would hope they'd take the level 1 compromise. There are some pets that I just cannot find because I am not online at the proper time of day. I'd definitely be willing to pay for these - much more feasible than trying to stay awake until odd hours when I have a strict schedule to stick to.

I'd rather they not drop caged pets down to level 1, but I can understand those who prefer that option. I'd like to be able to make some money leveling rare pets to 25 and selling them, but I do think there should be a restriction to keep people from advancing too fast. Either restrict learning pets so that you can't learn any pet that's a higher level than the highest currently in your journal, or make it so that the achievements every five levels unlock the ability to learn pets up to that level (so if your highest pet is level 9, you can learn caged pets up to level 5, for example).

Edit: I was just looking through the thread again, and realized Quintessence's character wears the same hat mine does.Good taste!

Dementron wrote:I'd rather they not drop caged pets down to level 1, but I can understand those who prefer that option. I'd like to be able to make some money leveling rare pets to 25 and selling them, but I do think there should be a restriction to keep people from advancing too fast. Either restrict learning pets so that you can't learn any pet that's a higher level than the highest currently in your journal, or make it so that the achievements every five levels unlock the ability to learn pets up to that level (so if your highest pet is level 9, you can learn caged pets up to level 5, for example).

I agree. It would be similar to the hunters being unable to tame a pet that is of a higher level than themselves, so the pet battler/collector would be unable to gain a battle pet no more than a level or two over their highest trained pet. I've also been looking forward to this for the profit/trade in mind (I've an alt on an rp server who is a trader).

Or maybe you could buy the pet on the AH, but can you control it? *hears the cursing of yet another green trainer whose auction-bought pet just ran off* That's another possibility...

Shad0cat wrote:If they are not going to allow the sale of wild caught pets on the AH then why is there a "battle pets" category in the live ah? Have they changed their mind again?

Some of the non-wild caught pets that your characters have learned will become tradable, i.e. phoenix hatchling, dragon whelplings, sprite darter, baby crocalisks, archaeology pets and TCG pets. Basically, any pet that isn't a quest reward (the crocalisks don't count since its the bag that's the reward, not them themselves), an achievement reward, a guild pet, a promotion pet, wild-caught or from the Blizzard pet store will be tradable. At least, that's how it stands at the time of writing.

Shad0cat wrote:If they are not going to allow the sale of wild caught pets on the AH then why is there a "battle pets" category in the live ah? Have they changed their mind again?

I was wondering about this too. Found out that there are two tabs for pets (Misc > Companions tab and then Battle Pets tab), and the first one is for items while the second is for caged pets.

Craft a pet and then sell it? It'll show up in the companions tab. Cage a vendor pet? It'll show up in the battle pets tab. The main difference between the two is that one hasn't been learned yet and therefore doesn't have stats. The other already gained stats since it existed in the Pet Journal prior to being caged.

I don't think the concept of caging wild pets is completely off the table yet, but the ability to cage wild pets definitely won't come with the release of MoP. We might have to wait for a while before we can cage them, or devs may decide to just toss the idea altogether. We'll have to wait and see either way.

So instead of catching wild pets we can go buy vendor pets and train them to a higher level for resale and they keep their stats? That actually seems like a better deal to me than selling wild caught pets. For people who want to make a profession from battle pets they could do this as a trainer. Sure it's going to take longer to actually level a pet than it would to go catch one and slap it in a cage but that's going to keep the resale market from being flooded. Due to the time it would take to level the vendor pets that should keep prices up where a catch and sell market might get flooded. If we were able to just sell the wild caught pets people would still be out there camping the rarer ones long after they had 3 of the best quality making it harder for others to ever obtain one outside of the ah and this is not a good thing. I could see training a vendor pet while you're out hunting for your own collection as being a good way to turn a profit on the side.